If you want to print business cards in full colour there are a few
ways to go about it:
1. As the previous person said - use an inkjet printer. There are a
few problems associated with that system however:
(a) The tendency for the ink to smudge if it gets wet.
(b) The likliehood of the images (say 8 up on an A4 sheet) being
slightly out of square when cut on a guillotine.
The smudging problem can be overcome by laminating the cards and the
"out of squar" problem can be overcome by printing a guildeline on the
A4 sheet of card and then *manually* cutting one straight edge prior
to guillotining.
Even if you produced your own 8 up business cards and got a Printer's
Output Bureau (for negatives / positives + proofs) to print super high
quality cards FOR you, youmight still have problems with "squareness"
because many colour printers do not have "lays" and "grippers" -- that
is the proper holding and positioning of the card or paper on each
consecutive print.
Normally this error is minimal, so it can be often overlooked if you
don't print straight lines too close to the edge.
2. A second method would be to buy a second-hand printing machine,
which you could acquire for several hundred dollars, but it would
involve learning a lot about the printing trade and you would still
not achieve "close register" (overlaping of colours in identical
places) because the cheaper printing machines are incapable of doing
that perfectly. You could get some pretty reasonable results though.
If you used a printing machine you would need to get aluminium offset
printing plates made which involve getting negatives made as well.
3. A third method would be to get a proper printing press, but I would
imagine taht is out of the question :-)
4. A fourth method would be to find a local printer who would accept
your computer files and then make negatives and plates and print a
professional job.
This could be made economical if you printed say 2, 3, 4 or 5 jobs at
a time on the one sheet of card. The result would be FAR superior to
any other system, IF you were dealing with a printer who was routinely
handling quality work. Many small printing firms or businesses cannot
produce good quality full colour work.
In case you are not aware, "full colour" (or 4 colour) means printing
in CMYK which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black.
You can convert any scan from RGB to CMYK in any quality photo editing
program like Photoshop. In fact it would be best to use that program
because it is much easier to use than others and is used by most
people involved in quality graphics work. You need not have a late
version of Photoshop but anything from ver 2.5 onwards - some of which
were given away free with scanners.
Not all good quality colour work has to be done with "halftone dots".
Quite a lot of good work is prepared in vector graphics programs like
Freehand or Illustrator and you print the individual colours (as many
as you like).
If you are dealing with professional output bureaux for the output of
negatives (and plates) you might find that some of them charge a lot
extra for anything that is produced on non-standard computer programs
(No well known software names mentioned here). |
